We’re continuing to see signs that the dominant GPL open source
license may be fading from favor among commercial open source
software players. The latest move away from the GPL comes from
content management software vendor Alfresco, which is moving to
the LGPL after originally releasing its code under the GPL three
years ago. The reasoning for the shift, according to Alfresco CEO John Newton,
is the company sees greater opportunity beyond being a software
application, particularly given the emergence of the Content
Management Interoperability Services standard. Alfresco won
mostly praise for its move, and it does make sense given where
open source is going these days.

UPDATE: The final vote is in and a winner has been declared, with
Matt Asay and his arguments for the GPL taking the prize. You can
see the debate or follow links to the other judges’ votes and
thoughts here.

This is my assessment as a judge of the recent open source
license debate held by the FOSS Learning Centre. We’ll have
to begin with some qualifications and definitions, starting with
the fact that there is no ‘best’ open source software license.
Still, a star-studded open source software panel provided a
lively, informative debate on the merits of some top open source
licenses. For that, I congratulate and thank the panelists, Mike
Milinkovich from the Eclipse Foundation arguing for the Eclipse
Public License, Matt Asay of Alfresco arguing in favor of the GPL
and David Maxwell from Coverity arguing for …

Code scanning and management vendor Black Duck reports the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2)
now dipping below 50% share of open source software. While we
already knew that GPLv2 was somewhat in decline from its far
greater share of open source code over the last 5-10 years, it is
useful to know what pool of code we’re talking about. We must
also remember that while GPLv2 may not be as dominant as it once
was and that other licenses, particularly GPLv3, are quickly
gaining share, GPLv2 is still quite relevant to enterprise open
source software, is used in a variety of newer and popular
applications across the enterprise stack and is likely to remain
in the top 10 licenses for a long time.

Regarding GPLv2 and Black Duck’s findings, some folks are rightly
asking what code and how much of it are we considering where
GPLv2 accounts for half or less of the …

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source
software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for
networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license
and concern over the openness (or closedness,
depending on your perspedtive) of the latest devices. Amid all of
it, we’re pleased to present our latest long-form report,
CAOS 12 - The Myth of Open Source …

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